10/20/2010 @ 11:00PM

The Chinese Threat To India

Itis said that Chinese leaders have a fascination for Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a twelve-part prime time documentary series that was broadcast on Chinese television in 2006. It “endorses the idea that China should study the experiences of nations and empires it once condemned as aggressors.”

According to Fareed Zakaria, ‘”The basic message of the series is that a nation’s path to greatness lies in its economic prowess and that militarism, empire and aggression lead to a dead-end.” If China has grand plans of geo-political expansion, then it has clearly deferred them for another day–”conceal brilliance, cultivate obscurity,” said Deng Xiaoping.

India’s foreign policy has not been monolithic. It has danced to the ebb and flow of domestic political and economic events. The early decades were completely dominated by the intellectually romantic worldview of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister who was also his own foreign minister. Nehru was an idealist, a pacifist, who chose to believe (his critics would say “delude himself”) that India gained by remaining nonaligned and against the Cold War. Diplomats like Shashi Tharoor say Nehru ignored an American overture to take over Taiwan’s seat at the United Nations’ Security Council; instead he offered it to China! He was rudely awakened by the war with China in 1962.

The jury is somewhat out on who attacked whom. The popular view is that China attacked India. But some analysts also think that India instigated the war. Former National Security Adviser J.N. Dixit believed that Nehru made a grievous error of judgment in ordering an all-out general offensive when it should have been selective, gradual and area-specific. Nehru, in his view, should also have struck a quid pro quo. “We could have told the Chinese that, in return for our accepting their resumption of authority over Tibet, they should confirm the delineation of the SinoIndian boundary as inherited by them and us from the British period.”

That lack of prescience is hurting. There have been no skirmishes along the India-China border for two decades, but the dispute continues to be, to use Deng Xiaoping’s phrase, “a plate of stale rice buzzing over with flies.” China recently denied visa to an Indian army general who had served in Kashmir, in effect questioning India’s claim over it. China has posted People’s Liberation Army troops in Pakistan-held Kashmir ostensibly to help with flood control.

Earlier, it had blocked an Asian Development Bank loan for a project in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (which China calls South Tibet). It protested when India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh campaigned there for state elections. Yet trade between the two countries is booming. They cooperate at the World Trade Organization and in the climate change negotiations. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has told his Indian counterpart, “When we shake hands, the whole world will be watching.”

But deep suspicions remains. Observations say perceptions at both ends are “mired in stereotypes,” and awareness about each other is “abysmal.” Many Indians suffer from a siege mentality, believing that China is out to encircle it by building alliances with Pakistan and Nepal. India is also hopelessly outflanked in the arms race. Quite naturally, India’s suspicion of the Chinese has survived over generations.

Manmohan Singh is not a career politician. He is a shy and withdrawing kind of person. His apparent shortcomings are perhaps also his strength. He does not carry a blinkered vision of history. He does not suffer from the Indian politician’s curse of short-term, reactive decision-making. He has the intellectual apparatus to understand how the world is changing. Singh struck an unusual friendship with President George W. Bush. One was widely criticized as “India’s weakest PM”; the other seemed to love the epithet of “America’s warmongering president.”

Bush visited India in March 2006, the first visit to India by a Republican president. It was the second visit by an American president within six years. Bounding down the aircraft’s stepladder, Bush’s body language was effusive with Manmohan, who broke protocol to receive him at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport late at night. Turning to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, Bush was overheard saying: “I want this deal done.” President Bush was referring to an exceptional civilian nuclear deal that allows India to import uranium for its power plants from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group without subjecting its military reactors to international inspection. Uranium supplies were banned three decades ago, after India test-detonated nuclear bombs “for peaceful purposes.”

Is there an “India card” that America can play against China? Is there an “America card” that India can play against China? And is China getting increasingly wary about these chimerical cards that India and America can play around with? After all, an opinion scan of over eighty American and Indian military officials in Jane’s Foreign Report suggested that “China represents the most significant threat to both countries’ security in the future as an economic and military competitor.” A US officer went to the extent of saying that “we want a friend in 2020 that will be capable of assisting the US militarily to deal with a Chinese threat.”

Is this kind of war talk an overreaction? Is this bit about “cards” just discredited poker talk from a bygone era in world politics? Isn’t it much more about hard-nosed economic bargaining, about self-interest driven diplomacy in which each country wants to maximize its own gains rather than become obsessed about inflicting maximum damage on the other? Doesn’t America need China today as much as it may need India tomorrow? Doesn’t India stand to lose much economic clout if it allows America to dominate its China policy? Will China forget that it has become a superpower precisely because it has chosen the path of “peaceful development”?

Even more philosophically, have human beings become infallible enough to shun greed and power? Has a history of ambition and plunder by the powerful got so blunted by rising prosperity that it will never repeat itself? The answers, my friends, will be blowing through and creating the winds of the twenty-first century.

Raghav Bahl is the founder-editor of India’s largest media house, Network18. Amongst the partnerships he has created are channels, websites and magazines–CNN-IBN, CNBC-TV18, Viacom-Studio18 and Forbes India, for example–growing the company from its inception in 1993 to a market cap of $1 billion.

Excerpted from SUPERPOWER? THE AMAZING RACE BETWEEN CHINA’S HARE AND INDIA’S TORTOISE by Raghav Bahl by arrangement with Portfolio Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) Raghav Bahl, 2010.